Greetings, Internet! Thank you for all of the support and comments on the article last week. Obviously, this series is filling a need that a lot of you had, and I hope I can continue to provide quality content.

My original plan for this week was to review several card databases and deck-builders for mobile devices. However, I came across an interesting problem: Many of the MtG apps on the App Store and Android market haven’t been updated with New Phyrexia, and I don’t want to recommend apps that aren’t going to be updated with new data. I’m going to give the developers another week and see if more of them get updates live.

So what are we going to talk about this week? As Trick mentioned at the top of my previous article, this series is going to cover more than just mobile software—any software that can help Magic players is free game. Today, I’m going to cover a website that former pro Ben Halpern introduced me to a few months ago: MagicDraftSim.com.

MDS is, as the name implies, a limited format simulation site. You can simulate a draft for any format in Magic, going up against seven CPU players who will do a decent job at following signals and making picks. The interface for the draft is very similar to MTGO, showing your previous picks at the top of the screen and a grid of the cards in your current pack at the bottom. Hovering over a potential pick will bring up an Oracle reading of the card as well as the average pick number based on previous drafts done by others on the site.

You can sort your picks by color, casting cost, card type, and rarity, as well as hide the colors that you are not using. Anyone who’s drafted online before should be familiar with the interface. It’s a little annoying how the screen keeps jumping to the top after each pick, but this is a limit inherent to Web applications, and not really a programming error by the developer. After all of your picks have been made, you will be brought to another screen where you can build your deck. Again, this is similar to MTGO’s interface. You can sort your deck in the same way you could your picks, but there are two extra options. One lets you add basic lands to your deck, including an option to automatically calculate a recommend number of lands based on the number of mana symbols in your deck. The other button lets you draw a sample hand, and will give you a good idea of how the deck would draw in real life.

After you’re done building your deck, you can check below the deck-building section to see what the AI players have drafted. The CPU isn’t perfect, or sometimes even reasonable in its picks, but it does a good enough job that the site is definitely worth using.

In addition to the draft portion of the site, there is a sealed pool builder. You can select up to six packs from the history of Magic, and MDS will create and display a sealed pool for you. This portion of the site has a lot fewer options than the drafting section, and doesn’t even include a deck-builder. I’d really like to see the developers update this in the future. I’d also like to see a way to export your decks to a MTGO or Magic Workstation format.

So . . . what do we do with this site? Obviously, it’s great for trying out a new format without having to spend any money. I’m not sure how close to the real print runs these packs are, but you can still get a lot of good information and practice. We’ve used the site at my LGS to help new players get into drafting and help them improve their skills. We’ll start off by having the new player watch us do a draft on the site, explaining to him or her why we make certain picks or passed certain cards. Then we’ll go through the deck-construction process with the player, talking about mana curve, card choices, and creature count.

After a couple of these run-throughs, we’ll have the players sit down and do a mock draft. We try to let them make most of their picks on their own at this point, but it allows us to answer questions they have on certain hard choices and offer advice that we just wouldn’t be allowed to offer during a live draft. Obviously, you could do the same thing with MTGO, but this is far more cost-effective.

Another way to use the site is to draft a deck, and then have your friends draft their own decks. Afterwards, proxy up the decks or build them on Magic Workstation and test them out. Again, I don’t believe the print runs match up exactly with real packs, but this is a very cheap way to get more practice in before a big event or a draft at your local game store.

That finishes it up for this week. Whether or not more developers manage to get updates through by next week, I will be reviewing the deck-builders and card databases available. If you have any suggestions, or know of apps that have already updated with New Phyrexia, shoot an e-mail to spork at thehappywalrus dot com. You can also hit me up on Twitter @The_Spork.

Michael “The Spork” Evans